Awhile back my Twitter account was hit with a ‘follow attack’ where 75-200 clearly fake accounts per day were following me. My follower count peaked at 14000 before I started trying to mitigate it. I blocked 4000 of them based on a shared account they all followed, but I’ve always wanted to get rid of the remaining ~7000 fake accounts still following me. Yeah, they’re not hurting anything, but I’d like a more accurate count.

Unfortunately to do the kind of analysis on my followers needed to try to find the fake ones (grabbing all of the ~11K followers, who they follow and are followed by and the details for those users), I need a TON of API requests and Twitter limits me to 350/hour. While my script is running I’d be unable to use Twitter otherwise. I could use multiple accounts, but I only have so many of those. So this is where I need your help.

By authorizing my app to use your account to access otherwise public information, I can get around the rate limits. For each additional authorized account I can make 350 requests/hour. The app I’ve created has the lowest permissions settings available (can only read public data) and can’t access your direct messages, follow anyone on your behalf or tweet. It’s straight-up read only (you can verify this on the app authorization screen).

If you’d like to help, click here to authorize your Twitter account (you will be immediately sent to the Twitter app authorization screen). This will not effect your rate limits and I’ll delete the application when I’m done gathering all of the data.